Thanks pagan, that worked. For what I am trying to do, I need to do this sort of optimization repeatedly. Can the computations with Minimize be sped up with an increase in the stepsize or some other sort of reduction in accuracy ?

Thanks pagan, that worked. For what I am trying to do, I need to do this sort of optimization repeatedly. Can the computations with Minimize be sped up with an increase in the stepsize or some other sort of reduction in accuracy ?